As the November 2020 presidential election approaches, it is worth imagining how a foreign adversary might attempt to intervene in the domestic political process. We have no evidence that any of the precise things we consider in this essay are actually happening—though some may well be. They are based on a review of what we know to be possible and plausible given what has occurred in the past and the vulnerabilities we can see clearly today.
Understanding when and how states may lawfully deploy countermeasures is critical for states operating in the cyber arena—not only to understand their own options when injured but also to anticipate the responses that their cyber activities may trigger from other states. This essay examines the role that countermeasures may play in the US cyber strategy of Defend Forward and argues that some states are developing a lex specialis of cyber countermeasures.
With little fanfare, Congress and the executive branch have cooperated effectively over the past decade to build a legal architecture for military cyber operations. The resulting framework is not a familiar one to most observers, especially when compared to the parallel frameworks associated with conventional military operations and with intelligence activities. Yet it is no less important and worthy of study, particularly in light of the Pentagon’s commitment to the “defend forward” operational model.
Forget about “AI” itself: it’s all about the math, and America is failing to train enough citizens in the right kinds of mathematics to remain dominant.
In this 30 minute video interview, Mark Walker at The Fintech Times chats to David Birch, an internationally recognised thought leader in digital identity and a member of the AU10TIX advisory board, and Carey O’Connor Kolaja, President and Chief Operating Officer of AU10TIX about the launch of INSTINCT.
In June of 2019, the New York Times reported that the United States was “stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin.” The reporters accused the United States of planting malware within Russian critical infrastructure under new authorities granted by the White House to the Department of Defense (DoD) for offensive cyber operations.
Fred Cohen was the first person to introduce the term “computer virus.” In a 1984 paper, he defined it as “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself. With the infection property, a virus can spread throughout a computer system or network using the authorizations of every user using it to infect their programs. Every program that gets infected may also act as a virus and thus the infection grows.”
